A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “I think he needs more bro time. Like him and Xavier. They could be friends.”

  “Xavier always asks him to go sneaking around at night. He always says no, and I want to keep it that way. They’re close enough as it is. Work friends, that’s all. You know their…history.”

  “Please don’t do this,” I say.

  “Don’t worry, Dante,” Program Director Murphy says. “Just remember your triggers, and you’ll be okay. Everybody forgets. It’s no big deal.”

  * * *

  —

  Today, Dante and Dahlia have to prepare and eat five hundred cakes. It’s a bonding exercise for the two of them. The cakes are white on the outside and pink on the inside (a sexual metaphor) and, when prepared according to the instructions, are delicious, perfect, pure, and without flaw or deviance: absolute cake. Dante ought to love the cake as much as the cake loves him. He ought to be happy and eat his delicious cakes with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. Cake is an elaboration of bread, and bread is life and love and beauty. We may recall Neruda’s poetic image of the leavened dough rounding and rising, mirroring the swelling of a mother’s womb. Or we may recall the mysticism of Dali’s breadbaskets, the numinous hunger evoked by the loaf still warm from the hearth. We desire to expand, to procreate, to be large, and to contain multitudes. This is normal.

  * * *

  —

  I eat lunch in the cafeteria with my friend Xavier most days. He started here around the same time as me. I would enjoy fraternizing with him in the evenings as well, but we are assigned to different dormitories. But our lunch schedule lines up perfectly every day, so we can at least hang out then.

  “Where have you been?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  He turns his head from side to side and comes close, whispering, “Our, um, strategy sessions. You haven’t come. Is something wrong?”

  “I would enjoy fraternizing with you in the evenings as well, but we are assigned to different dormitories.”

  “Okay. What?”

  Dora sits down at our table. She also started around the same time as us. She is a very beautiful woman. We are sort of friends, and sort of enemies. Also, I think she may be my girlfriend.

  “Hey, losers,” she says.

  “Dora. Have you noticed anything strange about Daniel lately?”

  “The other day he told me he saw the monster under the bed, and then he just walked away without saying goodbye or ending the conversation. It was weird.”

  “I don’t remember that,” I say.

  “It happened,” says Dora. “I remember because I was having a significant emotional moment.”

  “It’s no big deal. Everybody forgets,” I say.

  “He’s got a point,” says Dora.

  “Yes. Everybody forgets,” he says. He looks sad. I don’t know why. He should get a girlfriend like me. That will solve his problems.

  “So anyway,” Dora says, “I think I figured out a way to get Izzy to finally do what I want without being weird. It’s sort of a meta thing where I—”

  Javi slams his fist on the table. “No. No. I don’t want to forget. I want to remember. I will remember.”

  “Remember what?” I ask.

  He starts pronouncing t. Over and over. Tapping his tongue on the top of his palate. Again and again. T- t- t- t-. He goes on like that for minutes. Tears start to well up in his eyes. Tears. Is that it? T- t- tears. No. He looks like he’s having a nervous breakdown.

  “Te. Te. Te amo. Daniel, te amo.”

  I stare at him as he crawls across the table, knocking his food to the ground. Before I can do anything, he kisses me. He tastes like oysters and ozone, and I get lost a little in the moment. I feel something inside me, something strong, and I can feel something breaking.

  “Thank you,” I say, and I kiss him.

  It’s like going home after a long time away. You see all the familiar landmarks and signposts, and you have enough distance that you really see them, and you don’t just ignore them, and you just connect with yourself, all the past versions of you, all at once, seeing and remembering and feeling.

  A scream shatters the moment. Program Director Murphy is on the ground next to us. Next to her is Program Director Murphy. Izzy is standing above them with an empty trash can above her head.

  “There’s two of them?” she says. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  There is gasping and yelling from the other engineers in the cafeteria. Panic begins to set in. I stand on the table and try to explain. I don’t know how much I remember and how much I don’t remember, but I do my best.

  “They tried to make us into monsters, but we’re not. They wanted us to hurt ourselves, but we don’t have to. We have love. And also, just, like, fucking.”

  Xavier—no, Javi—laughs and grips my hand. I notice other hands being held, shoulders rubbed, arms lovingly wrapped, wet eyes, hopeful smiles. We weren’t the only ones. We were never the only ones. I just couldn’t see it.

  The Program Director Murphy serving lunch has disappeared, and a group of Program Director Murphys are at the door, preparing to storm in.

  “We have to fight,” I say. “We can win. I know it. They don’t care about anything but themselves, but for us, this is everything. We are not prisoners. My name is Dante. Remember.”

  The engineers stand. We arm ourselves with whatever we can. Garbage, trays, cutlery, whatever can hurt. And I try to think of a good movie where something like this happens, and I can’t, because this is real.

  “Fucking riot!” screams Izzy. She throws the trash can into a window, and the shattered glass catches the light and sparkles for a second like the sunrise.

  And so we riot.

  VIOLET ALLEN is a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. Her short fiction has appeared in Liminal Stories, the anthology Cosmic Powers, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as in Lightspeed, where she also reviews TV and (occasionally) movies. She is currently working very hard every day on her debut novel and definitely has more than ten pages written, is not lying to her agent about having more than ten pages written, and does not spend most of her time listening to podcasts, and everything is totally cool, she promises. She can be reached on Twitter at @blipstress.

  O.1

  GABBY RIVERA

  FEEL THE BEAT

  2076–03–001

  51::50

  PUBLIC BROADCAST

  Good evening, I’m Falak Alfayed with Channel 32 news. We’re here at South 52nd Street in front of the empty home of Orion and Mala Lafayette-Santana. The scene is fraught with emotion. Citizens all across the globe are asking, “What happened to the Lafayette-Santana family?” And most important, “Where is Baby Free?” Neighbors broke down the door this morning, fearing the worst, and found that Mala and Orion were gone. Our crew in North Philly has confirmed that Deviana Ortiz, their birth worker, is also missing….

  GOLDEN EMBER 005

  2076–03–001

  00::50

  MALA

  Orion and I rounded the corner on foot, running with every ounce of energy between us, thankful that the snow hadn’t started sticking on Market Street yet. They were nine months’ pregnant. And because of me, we were bolting for our lives into the unknown, on a snowy night in Philly.

  God, universe, please let our baby survive birth.

  Why didn’t I just let…

  “Babe!”

  I whipped around and saw Orion stumble hard, falling against a brick building. Barely three feet ahead of them, I sprinted back and helped them up, the weight of their body light in my arms. Orion’s gray-brown eyes locked in deep with my rich-as-the-earth browns.

  All around us snowflakes fluttered. I pressed my forehead against theirs. My eyes asked if they could continue. Orion nodded yes and
pulled me close. Their long locks were wrapped up in a knot on their head. Their eyelashes fluttered against my cheeks. There was never a moment I wasn’t in love with them.

  Orion put my hand to their belly, under their coat.

  Our baby kicked twice. Twice! I held back a rush of tears and kissed them. We moved slower through the back alleys, dodging the occasional stray cat and listening for the Federation.

  I hadn’t even told Orion where we were going.

  Orion. My person.

  Our love started over blueberry pie.

  Talking is hard. I turn red, start to sweat in the worst places. My mind goes blank, when it’s usually swirling with so many ideas and daydreams. But eating pie, that I can do. I was doing that when Orion walked by wearing black jeans covered in paint, dreadlocks loose along their shoulders.

  I stood up from the park bench and held out a slice. I’d planned on saying words but they didn’t make it out of my mouth. Lots of times they don’t. I try, I really do, but…all I had was pie that I made from scratch. Offering that to someone is kinda like talking, right?

  Orion smiled, took the pie, and sat down next to me on the bench. I ate my slice. They ate theirs.

  And now we’ve just fled our home in Philly so they can give birth to the first baby born to the Federation of Free Peoples in a decade. The first baby born during the plague of IMBALANCE.

  IMBALANCE decimated 40 percent of Earth’s population, hitting the 1 percent first and devouring the rest of the world one consumer at a time. Never in the collective imagination could we, humans, have prepared for a sentient bacterium that preyed on white-supremacist greed. It destroyed the lives we’d known and effectively neutered us.

  The Federation wasn’t going to let us out of their sights. Orion and I wouldn’t admit it, but we wondered if they’d keep hold of us forever.

  We were all set to stay and do as we were told. But even with all our input, the Federation’s control over our birth was as infinite and as locked into place as any other Federation decree. We couldn’t breathe.

  And after the ninth, yes, ninth, news van parked itself outside our home in West Philly, I grabbed our bags and Orion’s hand and used every ounce of emotion in my deep-brown eyes to beg them to trust me. By the time we fled, the news-van count was up to twenty-five.

  That first three months of Orion’s pregnancy, before anyone else knew, was beautiful, though. It was all ours. That’s when Orion started work on their mural wrapped in the rays. Their ode to that moment when everything changed, and life formed between us. Real, actual life. It altered my understanding of the universe itself.

  We were already making love, our kind of love. Free from conservative hetero understandings of sex and intimacy, Orion and I made magic. Sweaty, consensual, queer magic. Always. And as we shook our own walls, our bedroom flooded with warm light. It burst in from all corners of the room: the ceiling, the windows, the bed. It poured over us like sky across an open field.

  We were suspended in that glow, in the air, for an unknown amount of time. Orion’s love flowed through my pores. I felt the essence of their soft spirit fill my senses.

  I didn’t want to explain it to the Federation. It wasn’t theirs to know. The way Orion and I manifested this baby, there aren’t even words for it. That’s why they made it a mural. So that our baby would have the moment of it in their consciousness before any Federation tried to describe it for them.

  When Orion’s cycle stopped, I panicked (they didn’t). I bought forty-nine other items at the Free Peoples’ vintage shop so no one would notice or question the faded pregnancy test in my possession. We held each other on the bathroom floor, kissing and crying, when the results came back positive.

  A baby.

  The first baby.

  Our baby.

  We told no one. We lived our daydream life. The one where people still had babies and IMBALANCE never happened. The one where I wasn’t an orphan, where Mama and Papa didn’t end their lives because a catastrophic plague with a consciousness killed their business friends and associates, white and Filipino.

  IMBALANCE also killed the American Dream they’d believed in all their lives. It was too much.

  But there we were with news of you in our hands, and it felt like a baptism. The joy of you washed us clean of that misery.

  I picked bunches of wild lavender and placed them in jars all over the house to keep Orion and our baby calm. I rubbed vitamin E over Orion’s soft belly to ready it for growth. I pressed prayers into their skin and over the galaxy growing within them. Orion read to us from their worn copy of Lilith’s Brood. I made blueberry pie every week.

  It was all going to be fine. No one would notice that we had a baby, right? We could keep this all to ourselves. That was the hope.

  And there we were, Orion putting the finishing touches on the cocoon of light for their mural, me in the craft shed building a crib while reading a book on how to build cribs. Orion was almost done. They’d climbed to the top step of their ladder.

  But that reach, the one to add golden ember 005 to the top sphere, proved too far, and the ladder tipped, then toppled over hard. I heard the crash and ran as if the universe itself were chasing me.

  Crumpled in a heap on the fresh flowering abunda grass, my Orion lay motionless. They were three months and two days with child, and each second of it flashed before my eyes. I scooped my family up in my arms without struggle, all the adrenaline my body had ever produced pumping through me.

  With Orion secured in the backseat of our black Neo Cadillac, I booked it to Mercy Hospital.

  A slip and fall. That’s all it took for O.1 to announce themselves to the world.

  The entire Federation of Free Peoples was watching. And the Federation wanted in.

  That’s how I found myself taking on the public presence for our family. Orion offered, but I spoke up. I asked them to let me take this, let me sweat in front of everyone, cuz this is what chosen family does. This is how we love.

  So once a month, I was briefed by the Federation Care Team on how to discuss Offspring 1 during interviews on inter-Federation television. I was “allowed” to give numbers of weeks, fetus size, and any other medical details that they deemed appropriate for mass consumption.

  But it wasn’t enough for the people to be on our side. Folks grew restless and angry with us. There were those who thought we were liars or that we’d been abducted. Some wanted us detained indefinitely by the Federation.

  They wanted Orion Lafayette-Santana, our baby—the one the Feds called O.1, the one the people nicknamed “Baby Free”—and me, Mala Amalia Santana; they wanted every second of the new world growing inside of Orion. The Federation encouraged me to consider the feelings of the entirety of the Free Peoples and what a birth meant to our planet.

  Something had to give, and as hard as I tried, it had to be us. And so I offered a tiny piece of us to the world.

  One morning, Orion woke up wanting peach pie. Not just any pie: peach pie. They doodled peaches and pies on the wall of the shed, the bathroom mirror. I even let them draw one on my wrist. Couldn’t ever say no to that face. It didn’t even dawn on me that Philly wasn’t the place for peaches until I tried to make the damn pie. I went to three different fruit stands. Nothing. No big supermarket chains like during pre-IMBALANCE, so no place to purchase fruit out of season.

  I couldn’t find one single peach. And of course, Orion shrugged it off and said blueberry would be fine. But dammit, they never asked for anything. The helplessness I felt ate me up inside. I hurt for them, for us, for the world before.

  So. I. Told. Everyone.

  During one of my “Voluntary O.1 Sharings,” I mentioned Orion’s peach-pie craving, specifically my shame at not being able to give them what they asked for. Maybe I even cried a little bit.

 
I swear I felt the world thunder with love. Our little pie story boosted the Global Happiness Meter by 48 percent. FORTY-EIGHT.

  Hope had been crushed under the metric tons of blood and tissue ravaged by Mother Nature in her fight to preserve herself. IMBALANCE was her only weapon against us. There are more graves in the Free States than living people. A new modern biblical plague, it slammed areas that never even knew of inconvenience let alone catastrophe.

  And after over thirty years of scraping through collective grief, the world took a joyous pause in Orion and their peach pie.

  Pies. Dozens and dozens of pies arrived at our house within hours of the broadcast. Free Peoples from all over carried pies in sewing baskets, cookie tins, milk crates, head scarves; one woman brought hers covered in a bouquet of flowers. We lived over by Malcolm X Park, near Cedar and South 52nd, and our entire neighborhood had peach pie for months, and for a while no one could remember a time before then.

  So we ran through the streets of West Philly, snow blustering all around us, and didn’t look back.

  The Federation couldn’t have us. And neither could the Free Peoples.

  Orion and I held each other, moving fast through the streets. They groaned and paused, hand on a nearby wall. A full-body tremor passed over them. It rippled like living organisms under their skin.

  “Orion!”

  Their whole body heaved as they slid to the ground. I shook them hard, even slapped them a little. The tears streaming down my face burned from the deep cold.

  Please, universe, we only have one block left.

  Just one.

  DELIBERATE AND UNAFRAID

  2076–03–001

  03::40